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Memory-guided microsaccades
- Source :
- Nature Communications, Vol 10, Iss 1, Pp 1-14 (2019), Nature Communications
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 2019.
-
Abstract
- Despite strong evidence to the contrary in the literature, microsaccades are overwhelmingly described as involuntary eye movements. Here we show in both human subjects and monkeys that individual microsaccades of any direction can easily be triggered: (1) on demand, based on an arbitrary instruction, (2) without any special training, (3) without visual guidance by a stimulus, and (4) in a spatially and temporally accurate manner. Subjects voluntarily generated instructed “memory-guided” microsaccades readily, and similarly to how they made normal visually-guided ones. In two monkeys, we also observed midbrain superior colliculus neurons that exhibit movement-related activity bursts exclusively for memory-guided microsaccades, but not for similarly-sized visually-guided movements. Our results demonstrate behavioral and neural evidence for voluntary control over individual microsaccades, supporting recently discovered functional contributions of individual microsaccade generation to visual performance alterations and covert visual selection, as well as observations that microsaccades optimize eye position during high acuity visually-guided behavior.<br />Microsaccades are small-amplitude, fixational eye movements that are largely thought to be involuntary. Here, the authors demonstrate that monkeys (and humans) can be easily trained to respond to a remembered target location with a volitional microsaccade, and that a population of superior colliculus neurons is selectively associated with them.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
0301 basic medicine
Superior Colliculi
genetic structures
Science
Population
General Physics and Astronomy
02 engineering and technology
Stimulus (physiology)
Neural circuits
Article
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Midbrain
Memory guided
Young Adult
03 medical and health sciences
Spatial memory
Memory
Neural Pathways
Saccades
Biological neural network
Animals
Humans
lcsh:Science
education
Superior colliculus
Neurons
education.field_of_study
Multidisciplinary
Working memory
Eye movement
General Chemistry
021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology
Macaca mulatta
eye diseases
Eye position
Memory, Short-Term
030104 developmental biology
Covert
lcsh:Q
Female
Microsaccade
0210 nano-technology
Psychology
Neuroscience
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Nature Communications, Vol 10, Iss 1, Pp 1-14 (2019), Nature Communications
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....7c50f356e140b99dc974afb212627ee3